18 entries from April 2019

Angel biscuits have been on my to do list for years. I finally made the time to begin tinkering with them. What has interested me is that angel biscuits are leavened with baking powder and soda as well as with yeast. The potential for flavor development in the biscuit excites me. I also like the idea of adding layers to the leavened biscuit. If the tinkering progresses in the direction I am hoping, I look forward to seeing how Angels like being deep fried.

It took way longer than I thought. We use our thumbprint style doughnut as the shell. We dress the shell with our vanilla-buttermilk glaze and a coating of chocolate glaze. We sprinkle our white chocolate pretzel crumbs over the top. The filling has evolved. Now we make a rich custard and lighten it with whipped cream. The filling crests the top of the doughnut, revealing a glimpse of the decadent indulgence.

While we still use roasted doughnuts for there own doughnut crumb, my shortbread fetish has bubbled over into doughnutland. We now use a base vanilla and chocolate shortbread for many of our other crumb toppings for the doughnuts. The shortbread is decadent and crunchy. It is flavorful canvas.

We have been pressure cooker fanatics for years. We have stood on soap boxes promoting there efficiency and necessity in the kitchen. In Ideas in Food: Great Recipes and Why They Work, we had the chapter on pressure cooking cut out. Thankfully Aki was able to weave much of the material back into the book. Most of the material she integrated revolved around using the pressure cooker for cooking broths. In Maximum Flavor: Recipes That Will Change The Way You Cook we dove back into pressure cooking. A few examples of its functionality, at the time, were our pork belly and beans and sunflower seed risotto.

But as I have looked at pressure cooking and the results I noticed a pattern. A pattern that made the reasoning for utilizing it in a broth chapter and where foods cooked together could mask the final results. Pressure cooking allows for the great extraction of flavor. Yes, it allows for the tenderization of meats, vegetables, grains and more. But as a whole it is detrimental to cook meats as a fast braise in the cooker. The meats become tender and for the most part flavorless. Even utilizing the idea of a double boiler the end result is a concentrated meat extract, not a better braised meat.

Resources are only useful when put to use. I often forget that point. Years ago, when we were writing Ideas in Food: Great Recipes and Why They Work, we created our beef seasoning. It was inspired by the Iron Chef Battle where Peter Kelly seasoned his beef with brown sugar and salt. Our beef seasoning has been in our tool chest for years. But we rarely bring it out, especially in its measured proportions. Today I dove into our book and followed the recipe. I seasoned up 2 steaks and will cook them later. I am eager with anticipation, because the beef seasoning is magical. It elevates whatever it is put in contact with.

The beef seasoning is a simple arrangement of ingredients. But its impact is monumental. It, like most of our work, is useful when combined with something else.

"I think you've made the perfect pie." Rare words from my husband, especially when we're discussing a chocolate pie. I know he meant them because this pie was gone in just a couple of days. I can't even take credit for the recipe. I was researching chocolate chess pies and I came across this Double Chocolate Chess Pie from Virginia Willis. It was one of the only recipes that didn't use evaporated milk. I kept reading recipes that called for 3-4 tablespoons of cocoa and I just knew they couldn't possibly have enough chocolate flavor. This one adds 1.5 ounces bittersweet chocolate chips and that was the difference I was looking for.

I used my own all butter pie crust (in Maximum Flavor & Gluten Free Flour Power) and blind baked it at 350°F for 40 minutes before using her filling. The only change I made was upping the salt to 1/3 teaspoon of fine sea salt and that pie was delicious. This was not surprising because Virginia Willis is a class act, but it was unusual because I am a compulsive tinkerer. There was a delicate brownie-like crust on top of a creamy chocolate filling and a crisp pie crust underneath. We served it with lightly sweetened whipped cream and nothing more was needed.

It’s time for a change. Ideas in Food has been our passion project for over almost 15 years and it’s past time to shake things up. For a long time we prided ourselves on our ability to write something every day but with the onset of social media this is no longer the right place for that. Instagram covers our “a la minute” discoveries. We’re going to reboot our concept of blogging. With that in mind we are going to start posting once a week, on Wednesdays, instead of every day. That doesn’t mean there won’t be the occasional odd posts here and there, old habits die hard, but we’d like to focus our attention on one idea or recipe that we are passionate about each week and try to do it justice. That will start next Wednesday. Till then we will be taking a break to refresh ourselves and to start mapping out new concepts to explore. For now, we’re just letting you know that a change is coming. We’ll be back soon and we hope that you will be too.

I came across Athletic Brewing'sRun Wild NA IPA at our local beer store. I didn't know anything about it and the owner of the store did not know much. He had brought the beer in at the request of his son. However, he made it quite compelling to take the risk and try the beer. If I didn't like it I could return the beer, no questions asked. I bought the beer and chilled it down. The beer is super floral, citrusy and hoppily bitter. It was a full flavored crisp IPA without the alcohol. I was thrilled and I'll definitely be going back for more.

Whenever we are teaching pasta workshops and demonstrating the benefits of a pasta extruder we make cacio pepe. It is a dish with just a few ingredients and that means we need to pay attention when we cook it. It took a moment of inattention, letting the butter brown in the olive oil as we toasted the pepper to create browned butter cacio pepe. The additional nuttiness and richness from the toasted milk solids added a deep complexity to the sauce. It has me thinking in a few directions. The first is revisiting brown butter stock, simplifying it by pureeing toasted milk solids and pasta water, to make a foundation. The other is leaving well enough alone and enjoying the simplicity of browning the butter and making the sauce. Both paths have merit and are worth traveling. The choice will depend on where we want to go with the bowl of noodles.

We have occasionally served a filled doughnut. We have always added the filling to the doughnut, like most doughnut shops, after the frying. I am fixated on changing that. I want to fry a filled doughnut. Today we accomplished that. We filled the doughnut with lemon custard and closed it like a calzone or an empanada. We discovered that frying a filled doughnut takes a much longer time to cook the interior dough. The long fry time gives me some hesitation. It adds an element of inefficiency to my already inefficient doughnut chaos. But the result is delicious. We shall continue to tinker with and produce small amounts at the shop. As we practice our process, hopefully we will gain some efficiency.

An egg white is 87% water. That's a lot. So when I see recipes that use only egg yolks and then add additional water or perhaps liquid dairy, I quickly began making rough calculated adjustments. Today we were playing with the lemon custard from our friend Stella's book. She uses yolks and then adds water. I treated whites as pure water and adjusted her recipe to accommodate my changes. The custard cooked up beautifully and no whites were wasted. (In her recipe she uses her whites for the meringue in her lemon meringue pie. I did not need to make meringue. I needed a decadent lemon pie filling.)

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